With the popularity of smart phones, input methods adapted to different kinds of smart phones become more and more, such as Sogou input method, Baidu input method, and so on. In the existed input methods, input methods of Chinese characters mainly include stroke input, pinyin input, handwriting input, and so on. In the existed input methods of Chinese pinyin, with 26 Latin letters as the basis, letters of Chinese pinyin (the initial and the final) are typed according to the input method of a typical American keyboard layout (see FIG. 1) or T9 layout (see FIG. 2), then the input initial and final are combined to obtain a Chinese pinyin, to realize Chinese input.
In the existed technology, when a user uses the pinyin input method to input a Chinese character, the user needs to input a sequence of letters forming the Chinese pinyin one by one. For example, when the user wants to input a Chinese character expressed in pinyin “zhang”, the user firstly needs to know the pinyin of the Chinese character is “zhang”, and then sequentially clicks buttons corresponding to letters of “z”, “h”, “a”, “n”, and “g” to type every letter. For example, when the selected pinyin input mode is the mode of the American keyboard layout (see FIG. 1) mode, the user needs to sequentially click buttons corresponding to the letters of “z”, “h”, “a”, “n”, and “g” to type every letter to generate the pinyin “zhang”. When the selected pinyin input mode is the mode of the T9 layout (see FIG. 2), the user needs to sequentially click buttons of 9-4-2-6-4 corresponding to the letters of “z”, “h”, “a”, “n”, and “g” to type every letter, and selects the pinyin “zhang” as the target pinyin (under the T9 mode, when the buttons of 9-4-2-6-4 are sequentially clicked, the pinyin output by default is “xiang”).
As described above, it is known that for the pinyin input methods in the existed technology, there are a number of input steps of Chinese pinyin, operation is onerous, and the efficiency of typing Chinese pinyin is low.